Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In this essay, I engage the distinction between “ritual” and “transmission” views of voting to clarify the poles of the debate over the first large-scale implementation of absentee voting in the United States. Absentee soldier voting serves as a historical case study of the rhetorical, administrative, and technical means by the “public” is disengaged from the physical limitations of the people comprising it. I seek to establish an empirical starting point for thinking more broadly about enduring tensions between notions of “public space” and “public sphere” in communication scholarship. Tentatively, I suggest that the topic of soldier voting illustrates one possible condition for civic nationalism: the transfer of the electorate from public space to public sphere through a process of reimagining the nature of the vote as a communicative act.